Quicksilver(78)
As cool as it might have been to ride the Buick Woody into the lower realms of the subterranean world that Emmerich had made for himself, none of us wanted to risk it. Once we were in the car, the doors would probably lock, and perhaps when we reached the level below, they would not open until someone vetted the passengers. As armed intruders, we would not be approved. With abrupt acceleration, we might then be dropped two floors farther, or four, or six, to a dungeon, or to an execution chamber where the car doors would then spring open and we would be ejected into a serpentarium of poisonous vipers, what started out as a Disney comedy like Flubber having turned into a scene more of a piece with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
The Brobdingnagian scale and pop grandeur of the Oasis were intimidating and inspired expectations of melodramatic events of catastrophic consequences. So I might have written if I had ever returned to Arizona! magazine.
Considering its impracticality, the Woodyvator most likely descended to a level originally intended, among other things, for the personal pleasure of Emmerich and the entertainment of important visitors. The need for a larger—and traditional—elevator suggested that the doors were incorporated in the ribbed walls. That one would be no safer than the Woody.
“Stairs,” Bridget suggested, and we went looking for them under the assumption that they would be located somewhere along the round chamber’s one long, shadow-draped wall. Winston padded quickly ahead of us and led us to a shaft recessed in the wall and fitted with a spiral staircase of stainless steel. We hesitated to descend until Bridget repeated what Panthea had said earlier—“We are what we are, and we need to have faith in that.” As a call to war, it was not as bold as the taunt Frederick the Great used with his soldiers at Kolín—“Come on, you rascals, do you want to live forever?”—but it got us moving just the same.
A stairwell is one of the most dangerous places you can find yourself, other than between an ambitious politician and a camera. Once you commit to stairs, you can’t get out between floors; you have nowhere to hide, and you can be riddled with gunfire from below or above, or from below and above. The stairs between the first and second levels of the Oasis were especially unnerving. Apparently to complete the illusion of a flying saucer filled with abducted automobiles, the round shaft through which the treads passed was lined with neon tubes programmed to send quick pulses of light from top to bottom, perhaps to suggest that, as per Star Trek, we were being teleported from the ship to the surface of some alien planet. The effect was disorienting. By the time we reached the bottom and fled through a door into the end of a corridor, we were dizzy, disoriented, and easy targets for anyone waiting to gun us down.
The wide corridor was deserted, and here the extraterrestrial theme gave way to Art Deco. The limestone floor featured polished black-granite harlequin-pattern inlays along its flanks, and a pure-black baseboard. The walls were clad with limestone, and the stepped molding at the top was black granite. Along the entire length of the barrel vault, an artist of considerable talent had painted packs of running dogs, all lean and elegant borzoi, some black and others white, and naked men in racing chariots pulled by equally stylized black steeds.
The air was pleasantly cool and smelled faintly of garlic, basil, cinnamon, and spices that I could not identify.
The silence and stillness were alike to those at ground level, but we knew the facility had not been abandoned. In addition to Panthea’s and Bridget’s visions, we could all feel presences unseen, waiting perhaps beyond the next door, and Winston proceeded with his ears pricked and his nose twitching, as alert now as he had been when he’d served as an attack dog for a drug gang.
Without conferring, the four of us had come this far without drawing our guns, leaving them concealed as best we could. Step by step, however, I felt a greater need to have a weapon in my hand.
Sparky cracked a door on a pitch-black room. When he crossed the threshold, LEDs bloomed bright, activated by motion detectors. Beyond lay an institutional kitchen equipped as well as one in a large restaurant or a small hotel. Everything looked clean and functional.
No chef, no cooks, no bakers, no prep workers.
An exhalation of warm breath on the nape of my neck caused me to pivot with a start, but there was no one behind me.
We found storerooms with a variety of contents, food pantries, a room full of janitorial equipment, an expansive chamber containing the heating and cooling system, and two spacious elevators.
A prickling in the palms of my hands. I blotted the left on my shirt, blotted the right.
This level was larger than the ample square footage dedicated to the car collection on the ground floor. It was apparently also offset to some degree from that upper story, because we found no evidence of the shaft through which the Buick Woody was transported to a still lower stratum of the structure.
The two most interesting rooms were at the end of the corridor, the first on the left. A recess featured the marquee and box office to a home theater, a lavishly detailed Art Deco masterpiece with an Egyptian theme. Cast-bronze cobras for door handles. Two life-size figures of Tutankhamen covered in gold leaf seemed to welcome us to the cinema of Death. Stone columns incised with hieroglyphics. Cast-bronze bas-relief lobby-wall panels that depicted gods of ancient Egypt—Bast, Horus, Isis, Osiris, Amen-Ra. An impressive auditorium. Five rows of eight plush seats each, descending to a proscenium flanked by nine-foot-tall gold-leafed statues of Anubis, the god of tombs and weigher of the hearts of the dead, he in a human body with the head of a jackal, his eyes and fingernails of polished onyx in this depiction. Throughout, the rich ruby-red carpet was patterned with stylized gold scorpions, their sharp-tipped tails raised.